THE CHILD SEES / 01
A world to inhabit.
Houses, Lumens, games, discoveries, achievements, rewards, friendly competition, cooperation, and a place within a growing history.
Our story
Solmere began with a decision about two children.
In 2025, Tessa James decided to take a more active role in the education of Layden and Kyser.
01 / What surrounds the curriculum?
A different kind of learning environment.
After researching homeschooling programs, online schools, and approaches to self-paced education, Tessa chose an online school to provide their core curriculum. It gave Layden and Kyser the ability to work through core subjects online and progress at their own pace.
As Tessa began building their new learning environment, she saw something missing. A school is more than its curriculum. Traditional schools surround academics with teams, competitions, friends, communities, games, challenges, recognition, activities, traditions, and chances to discover interests that may never appear in a core lesson.
What should surround the curriculum?
Tessa did not want to recreate a traditional classroom at home. She wanted to use the flexibility of self-paced education to create more opportunities for Layden and Kyser to learn, compete, explore, play, and pursue their curiosity. That question became the beginning of Solmere.
02 / Building what we could not find
This time, the students were his own family.
Tessa brought the idea to Anthony D. James. Anthony had spent years building systems for online education. He founded Linux Academy, an online learning platform that helped hundreds of thousands of people develop technology skills before the company was acquired in 2019.
Together, Anthony and Tessa began thinking beyond curriculum.
What if a family could build its own learning system around the education its children were already receiving?
What if learning, responsibilities, skills, games, and unexpected curiosity became part of the same experience?
What if that experience felt like entering a world?
Those questions shaped Solmere.
03 / Two views of one experience
A system for parents. A world for children.
Solmere grew around a simple idea: parents should be able to define and reinforce what matters in their family, while children experience that structure through something built for them.
For a parent
Learning, responsibilities, exploration, goals, accomplishments, and rewards.
For a child
Houses, Lumens, games, challenges, achievements, competition, cooperation, and discovery.
The mythology is not separate from the learning system. It is how the system comes alive for the child.
04 / The first students
Where the history begins.
Layden and Kyser became Solmere's first students. As the world developed around them, they also became the founder students of its first Houses. What began as an effort to build a richer educational experience for two children started becoming a world that other families could eventually enter.
Anthony and Tessa are its founders. Layden and Kyser are its founder students. The first Houses mark the beginning of a world designed to grow as new students enter it.
Why Solmere exists
Children already live in a world filled with screens. We believe there is an opportunity to change what children can do with them. A device can entertain a child for an hour. It can also become a doorway into mathematics, science, history, language, strategy, problem-solving, competition, creativity, and subjects they did not know existed.
Solmere was created to open more of those doors.
The curriculum can teach the required lesson.
Solmere begins with the question: what else could they discover?
